Snapchat Obligated To Hand Over Unopened ‘Snaps’ To Police

Snapchat rolled out a new feature just a few weeks ago that allows its users to tell a story with their snaps rather than just using it to show off just a single image for a pre-determined amount of time. Hopefully the story Snapchat users send to one another won’t involve anything incriminating considering unopened snaps can apparently be seized by local law enforcement.

Snapchat published a blog post yesterday detailing how the company is obligated to hand over unopened snaps to the police if they deem it necessary. The main point is the snap needs to be unopened in order for them to be handed over to authorities since opened snaps are deleted from Snapchat’s servers once they’re opened.

Since May 2013, Snapchat hasn’t handed over a large of amount of snaps to authorities as they say only around a dozen of them have been detained by local law enforcement. Considering the service sees 350 million snaps in a single day, this is certainly an extremely low number of snaps that the service has had to hand over to authorities. In other words, your gloating of your recent crime spree to your Snapchat buddies is probably safe, so long as they all open your snap in time.